Today’s walk took me through the lovely campus of the Adrian Dominican Sisters. Appropriately, I was chewing on a quote from Dominican John Tauler, his first stage of the mystical life. It involves
reflecting on the wondrous tokens of love which God has so marvelously granted to us in Heaven and earth; the abundance of favors God has shown to us and to all His creatures; how all nature–verdant and blossoming–is filled with His glory; how He has flooded the whole of creation with His unfathomable mercy; and the great gifts He gave to man, how He has sought him out, guided and enriched him; how He invited and taught him and watched over him with patience; how, for our sake He has become man, suffered, and offered His life and soul for us in order to draw us closer to Him than words can express; and how the Most Blessed Trinity has awaited us to share in its eternal joy. When we reflect on all this with profound love, a great and active joy will be born in us.
These words help to balance earlier statements where he is so inward you begin to think he does not value the external world at all. He does. So I see that walking can be a mystical exercise if you use the time to reflect on the divine love you see in creation, in Christ, and in your own life.
Yes, although I appreciated your earlier words from Tauler, I had wondered whether he valued the external world. Thank you for this beautiful passage, which provides important balance.
Unfortunately, passages like this one are rare in his sermons. But he is an excellent theologian of the inner life and seeking God within. Finding God in nature or in ordinary experience is not a theme he stresses. His descriptions of the Trinity, though, are beautiful — he envisioned the Triune life of God as a kind of pulsating dynamo of love, radiating out into all creation.